Cutey Honey

1973–74. TV series. (25 X 35 min.) Science fiction/superhero. org Go Nagai (manga). dir Tomoharu Katsumata. scr Keisuke Fujikawa, Masaki Tsuji, others. mus Taeko Watanabe. des Go Nagai, Ken Ishikawa, Shingo Araki, others. -jd

With a cry of “Honey Flash,” the android Cutey Honey transforms into the ultimate costume-changing superhero in the classic series that served as a prototype for anime’s magical-girl genre.

Honey Kisaragi might seem on the surface of things to be an ordinary, if extraordinarily pretty, young blond attending the St. Chapel Academy for girls, but appearances are deceiving. She’s actually an android created by robotics expert Doctor Kisaragi, inventor of the “airborne element fixation system,” which can draw elements from the surrounding air and re-form them into new shapes. Raised as the doctor’s own daughter, Honey is blissfully unaware of any of this until one fateful day when Doctor Kisa­ragi is assassinated by the criminal organization Panther Claw. Led by a witch named Panther Zora, Panther Claw targets jewels and works of art, and since the doctor’s invention would enable them to manufacture gems, jewels, and precious metals out of thin air, they’re desperate to get their hands on the device. Too bad for them, the doctor has hidden the system inside Honey. With a simple shout of “Honey Flash,” Honey can activate the system in her choker to transform into the “Warrior of Love” Cutey Honey, her clothes dissolving and then re-forming around her in a new shape. The same system provides her with the perfect means of disguise, constructing costumes and props as the occasion demands.

Honey’s secret is discovered by the newspaper reporter Seiji Hayami—he spots her transforming for the very first time, naked in mid-air as he drives by on the road—and she ends up joining forces with him and his family, including kid brother Junpei and pervy father Danbei, while she battles Panther Claw. Sister Jill, Zora’s younger sister, is head of the organization’s Japanese branch and communicates with Panther Zora and oversees operations by using a device that looks like a crystal ball. Most of the other top agents have names ending in either “Panther” or “Claw”—Black Claw, Fire Claw, Drill Claw, Tomahawk Panther, Scissor Panther, Sea Panther, Octo-Panther, and so on. A typical episode contains several of Honey’s transformations into various disguises as she tries to either infiltrate or evade Panther Claw’s gun-toting henchmen, and a final showdown with the master villain of the episode. Few operatives appear in more than one episode—battles tend to end decisively in Honey’s favor after a climactic swordfight.

The OAV series, New Cutey Honey, is set in a dystopian future. Crime is running rampant in Cos­play City under the control of a crime boss named Dolmeck, and the superhero Cutey Honey has faded into legend. But Honey does still exist, of course—she has just forgotten who she is. She recovers her memories with the help of the only other character from the first series to reappear, Danbei, the pervy father of Seiji and Junpei, who’s since become something of a cyborg, with steel plates in his head. Chokkei, a descendant of the original Hayami family, is the new boy sidekick.

The TV series, Cutey Honey Flash, is a retelling of the story designed to appeal to audiences interested in magical-girl shows such as Sailor Moon. In this version, Honey’s powers are activated when a handsome stranger gives her a ring and choker entrusted to him by Dr. Kisaragi, and she transforms into Honey for the first time to try to rescue her father, kidnapped by Panther Claw, using the “Power of Love.”

In the live-action movie Cutie Honey, this time it’s Honey’s uncle who has been kidnapped, and Honey, who’s been working as an ordinary office assistant up until now, tackles Panther Claw as Cutey Honey with the help of journalist Seiji Hayami and policewoman Natsuki Aki. An animated follow-up to the movie, Re: Cutie Honey, follows these same characters on new adventures, and is worth seeing for its combination of breakneck action, insane camera angles, and squash-and-stretch animation.

New Cutey Honey (1994–96, OAV, 8 eps.)

Cutey Honey Flash (aka Cutey Honey F, 1997–98, TV, 39 eps.)

Cutey Honey Flash (1997, summer festival movie)

Cutie Honey (2004, live-action movie)

Re: Cutie Honey (2004, OAV, animated spin-off from the live-action movie, 3 eps.)

Honey’s basic design is an attractive blond in a mini-skirt dress with orange accents. When she transforms into the superhero Cutey Honey, she has a short red flip haircut and a distinctive costume: a sleek red-and-black unitard with a peek-a-boo halter, and yellow gloves and boots. A choker and armband, both decorated by heart-shapes, are present in both her normal and super-forms. (They are hidden, however, when Honey is in disguise.) Later incarnations of Honey all bring their own changes to Honey’s basic design, altering her civilian dress to pink and white or blue and white, or rearranging the colors of her superhero costume. The live-action movie features the most radical remake, revising Honey’s peek-a-boo halter into a midriff-baring bodice molded in pink vinyl, with a heart-shaped window over her cleavage, and adding armored shoulder pads and strategic slashes to her tights.

All of Honey’s transformations are different. There is no stock transformation scene. Honey flips, does somersaults, changes in mid-air. Each change is treated as a chance to titillate the viewer with a new angle on Honey’s nudity and ends in a little pose to showcase the final result. A helpful list of each episode’s transformations is provided by Honey herself, in a taunting speech she delivers before facing off against the major villain of the week. Her roster of regular disguises includes Hurricane Honey, a skintight motorcycling outfit that appears whenever she needs to operate a vehicle; a photographer in bell-bottom slacks and a newsboy cap; and a model carrying a cigarette holder that doubles as a dart-gun. There are plenty of entertaining one-offs in Honey’s repertoire as well: Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” an ax-wielding wild man (complete with beard!), and a vine-swinging jungle girl. Other favorites include a trash-rummaging bag lady, a pistol-packing cowgirl, and a singer. Honey’s wild disguises seem downright restrained, though, compared to Panther Claw’s agents, all female, in their outrageous beast-themed costumes, complete with fur, horns, antennae, or tentacles. Some characters, such as the handsome reporter Seiji, are drawn in a relatively realistic style, but most are distorted cartoons—the teachers at St. Chapel Academy are unflattering caricatures of older women, drawn with bulging chins and wispy mustaches, and the lecherous Danbei is a stunted dwarf with a huge head and comically oversized teeth.

It’s budget animation—one memorable crowd scene shows the same man and woman fleeing the chaos at the circus over and over again—but the cel count increases for Honey’s fight scenes, acrobatic duels that are often quite gruesome. Honey skewers her opponents with a rapier, or cuts off their heads or limbs. Her armband transforms into the Honey Boomerang, which can take out several Panther Claw henchmen in one throw. Every fight takes place in an inventive location—a live volcano, a pirate ship, an acrobat’s pole at a circus, a hanging cable car over a gorge. Although most Panther Claw operatives turn out to have been androids and disintegrate after being “killed,” the show rarely goes out of its way to omit blood.

Cutey Honey is notable not only for being an early incarnation of what would later crystallize into the “magical girl” genre—her mid-air nude transformation was borrowed wholesale by later series such as Sailor Moon, and Honey needed only a slight cosmetic makeover and bust reduction to qualify for the genre with Cutey Honey Flash—but also for being the first heroine in anime history who fights battles by herself rather than as part of a male-dominated team, such as Gatchaman’s Jun the Swan. Honey is the unchallenged star of her own show. She is super-strong: she wrestles lions and hurls them through the air; she fences like an Olympic champion; she makes amazing vertical leaps and kicks mobsters in the face. Men exist only to be rescued by her and occasionally assist. Her main villains are female, and the only male antagonists are the gun-toting thugs in masks that serve as mere chopping blocks for Honey’s martial arts skills.

Cutey Honey is an oddity: on the one hand, it’s a typically exploitative showcase for creator Go Nagai’s schoolboyish obsession with naked girls (such as Kekko Kamen), but on the other, is also full of girl-power heroics. Like Astro Boy, Honey is a superpowered android created by a scientist to play the role of surrogate child, but her gender changes the story from an innocent’s view of a culture populated by corrupt adults to a comment on the role of women in Japanese society. Like Wonder Woman, another icon of femininity created from a male point of view, Honey’s combination of innocence, strength, and unashamed sexiness plays as a counterargument to the stereotype of Japanese women as delicate, modest, and shy. Honey is no traditional girl. She’s modern, exciting, exotic—she’s every girl simultaneously. Like a superpowered Barbie doll, Honey put a face on changing gender roles in ’70s society, and as a result, the original Cutey Honey series was popular with female viewers as well as male. Later incarnations of Cutey Honey played to more select audiences, each choosing a different aspect of the series to emphasize. The OAV series and live-action movie played up the peeping-tom factor of male characters drooling over Honey’s nude form (presumably to echo the interests of their male target audience), while Cutey Honey Flash courted adolescent girls by adding more romance and expanding the range of Honey’s fashions. Merchandising for the various incarnations illustrate this gap amply: artwork, statuettes, and action figures aimed at men portray Honey as a busty superhero in skintight costume, while the girl-oriented product line for Cutey Honey Flash includes fashion dolls in the style of the popular Japanese Jenny and Licca doll series.

The clever opening credits, with a knife-throwing stunt that causes Honey’s top to fall, and a checkerboard graphic hand sliding in front of the screen to shield viewer eyes, are a good example of the series’ approach to peek-a-boo humor, and its cheery pop theme song, simply called “Cutey Honey,” is one of anime’s greatest. The background music to the series is deeply entertaining as well, with lots of wah-wah horns, jazzy flute and keyboard, and funky synthesizer tracks. Women’s voices sound off a happy “Wow!” at key moments in Honey’s transformations.

Honey’s creative transformations are the highlight in nearly any episode, for their sheer bizarre inventiveness and wit. In one instance, dressed as a Buddhist nun, Honey’s identity is uncovered after a panther attack slashes her gown down the back, revealing bare buttocks.

A rare example of Honey needing rescue by somebody else: Honey’s entire entourage is attacked by monkeys hurling coconuts when the group is lost on a desert isle, Junpei is carried off by a white ape, and everyone else subsequently falls into quicksand where Honey can’t use her transformative powers. Junpei ultimately rescues everyone—having made friends with the monkeys in the meantime—by directing his new simian buddies to pull his friends out of the sticky trap.

A manga artist who was also an early innovator in the anime field, Go Nagai specialized in creating animated action series that went further than anyone had gone before with violence, nudity, or robot-on-robot mayhem (Devilman, Mazinger Z). Cutey Honey was the first animated TV series to make female nudity a regular part of the action.

At the time of this writing, only the OAV series New Cutey Honey and the live-action movie Cutie Honey are available in licensed English translation.

In its Japanese TV broadcast, Cutey Honey Flash took over the timeslot previously occupied by Sailor Moon Sailor Stars.

In the original TV series, Danbei Hayami is voiced by Kosei Tomita, also known as the original voice of Doraemon, Mazinger Z’s Doctor Hell, scientist characters in everything from Cyborg 009 to Dangard A, and the go-to guy for dubbing over Ernest Borgnine in Japanese versions of Hollywood movies.

violence Cutey Honey’s dispatch of Panther Claw’s operatives includes beheadings, hacked-off limbs, and bloody piercings through the heart. Plane and car crashes and explosions are also common. Some villains fall to their deaths from a great height or catch fire. Casualties occur in the human population too—in one of the series’ most tragic episodes, a young girl catches fire and dies from her burns.

nudity Every incarnation of Cutey Honey contains nudity. In the original series, Honey is typically doll-like and smooth, without visible nipples. Ripped clothing reveals buttocks, and Honey somersaults nude through the air. The OAV series is far more “bouncy” than the original series, and the animators paid lavish attention to the details of Honey’s naked form.